


Line of Fire

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s, Angst, Canon Temporary Character Death, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, WWII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 12:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7758211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They'd all cheated death, Jim knew, making it out of that factory alive - but he didn't like to think that Sarge was playing with the Devil's loaded dice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Line of Fire

**Author's Note:**

> From this tumblr prompt: Bucky taking a hit that should be fatal while they're in enemy territory. Steve is out of his mind with worry so Morita just does his job as best he can. Bucky makes him promise not to tell Steve about his abnormal healing. This is set during the war, so it's decades before a happy ending.

“Bucky! Bucky? What happened? Jim, how’s Bucky?”

“Tell ‘im I’ll be fine,” Bucky gritted out, the words shoved out of his mouth with a pained exhale and flecks of blood.

Jim would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a very _good_ medic — you might say that Uncle Sam wasn’t so interested in keeping his yellow troops alive, if you were the sort of unpatriotic SOB who said things like that — but even he could diagnose the chance for survival when Sarge had been shot in the chest and was breathing out blood.

“I’m not gonna lie to Cap!” Jim hissed, widening his eyes at Sarge. Hell, even in the dark and under fire from Nazi troops, Cap’s superpowers could probably sniff out a lie, and Barnes was already going ashen under the full moon. There was no reason for Morita to even unpack his kit.

“How is he?” Steve demanded, his voice shrill, and Jim busied himself pulling out rolls of gauze. “Jim!”

“Tell him,” Barnes groaned, blood spilling into his lung and up his throat, unable to bite down the pained moan when Jim shoved a handful of gauze and all the pressure he could manage onto Sarge’s splintered chest. “I swear to you on your father’s grave it’s not a lie, Fresno,” he panted, speaking more clearly than Jim thought he should be able to, but then most of Jim’s experience as a medic had been in the camps, carrying out the dead.

“Jim! Dammit, Bucky! Answer me!”

“My father’s not dead, you asshole,” Jim said shortly. He wrenched his blanket out of his pack with his left hand, tossing it clumsily over Sarge’s legs and doing absolutely nothing to stop Barnes’s sudden shivering, or calm his spasming limbs. “Swear on your own damn grave.”

“’m fine, punk,” Barnes croaked, and Jim could only hear him because his ear was a foot from Sarge’s face — even then it was faint, drowned out by the sound of Tommy guns and the dull roar of an oncoming tank.

“Don’t lie to me, you jackass,” Steve shouted back - everything enhanced, even his ears - ducking and weaving through trees too dense for him to throw the shield, unable to turn and catch a glimpse of his second in command without exposing Bucky and Jim to enemy fire. “Fresno, is he okay?”

“He won’t be if you don’t get rid of that tank,” Jim snapped, because he wasn’t going to lie to Cap and he wasn’t going to disobey Sarge and none of it was going to fucking matter if they all got mowed down by Nazis before Barnes gasped out his last bloody breath.

It took Jim a second to realize that Sarge wasn’t just flailing his limbs, and another long moment to figure out that the bastard was _trying to sit up_. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he grunted, shoving down harder on the field dressing and pinning Barnes to the ground. “You want to get shot in the head, too? One glorious death in battle isn’t enough?”

Bucky laughed, choking on his own blood. “Bullet went through, didn’t it?” he asked, after he’d almost caught his breath. “I can’t tell. It all feels like I got trampled by elephants.”

“Or sat on by Cap.” Jim huffed, then gave in when Barnes rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, Sarge, through and through. Why, you were hoping to die with the bullet that killed you?”

It was the sympathetic look on Sarge’s face that made Jim think it might not be sweat catching in his lashes and stinging his eyes. Jim scrubbed at his face with his sleeve — he didn’t need to be patted on the cheek by a man seconds from his own grave.

“I’m not dying,” Barnes lied again, his voice inexplicably stronger, the gurgle in his throat settling to a dull rasp. “Jim, swear on Steve’s life, I’m not. But you gotta trust me, and you gotta wrap my chest before trees start growing through it.”

“Fertilizer’s all you’re good for,” Jim sniffed, but Sarge would never, _ever_ swear on Cap unless it was true, so he hauled Barnes up and propped his useless carcass against a tree while he cut away his shirts and folded himself around his sergeant in an awkward embrace, Jim’s hands and arms and chest and teeth all trying to hold two field dressings in place long enough to bind them down.

Five minutes later the sounds of the fight had shifted over the hill, leaving Jim and his patient alone in a copse of trees on a pile of leaves tacky with gallons of Sarge’s blood. Jim had managed to shove Sarge into his coat and wrap him in a blanket, and he was still pale but there was already color back in his cheeks, and his hands were warmer than Jim’s when he felt at Sarge’s wrist for a pulse.

“Don’t take this wrong,” Jim said, chafing his hands together and debating the wisdom of starting a fire within sight of the German border, “but you should be dead. You make a deal with the Devil for your nine lives?”

“Don’t tell Steve.” Sarge sounded exactly like Dernier after he’d accidentally blown up the mess, experimenting with the meatloaf and a fuse.

Jim tucked his hands under his thighs and sighed. “Don’t tell Steve you’re dead. Don’t tell him you’re _not_ dead. Make up your damn mind, Sarge.”

“You’re right,” Sarge whispered, and he really ought to have said that ten minutes ago when Jim had shouted for him to “ _Duck!_ ” “I should’ve died.” He poked at a few blood-stained leaves with a twig, then lifted his head and stared at Jim. “That’s what you can’t tell Steve.”

“Why not?” Morita wondered, keeping his voice low because Cap had ears like a bat and the squad was already on their way back over the rise, safe and well and in control of the woods if their loud mockery was any sign. “Rogers seems like the kind of fella to believe in miracles. Sort of looks like one, if you’re looking at him like Carter does.”

“Sure,” Bucky smirked, the gaps between his teeth still dark with blood. “Stevie’s singing down angels and joining the holy choir.” The smile flickered and vanished, and Bucky stabbed his twig hard into the ground. “But I think you might be right, Fresno, about where I picked up my nine lives.”

It took Jim a moment to catch on, but no matter how many stories Gabe told about fiddlin’ and a cloven-hoofed jig there was only one Devil that they had all seen smiling at them through the bars, wire-rimmed glasses on a porcine face. “Damn,” he breathed, because there was nothing else to say.

Bucky snorted, and no air whistled through the hole that should have been in his lung. “Sure I am,” he agreed. “But there’s no reason to tell Steve that, not ‘til I’ve used up a few more lives.”

Jim didn’t want to lie to Cap. “Guess I just worry,” he said, when Rogers asked why Morita was still shaking if Sarge was fine. It wasn’t a lie: he worried about them all, now, because even a good medic wouldn’t know how to barter with the Devil for something good in the last life.

* * *

“Could you have survived the fall?” Jim demanded, grabbing Captain America by his lapels and hauling himself up the man’s chest to look him in the eye. “Could you? Could you still be alive if it had been you?”

Steve shoved him away, ran for the silence of the bar, and went to his own fall believing that Morita had blamed him for not diving after Barnes — but Steve had never answered, and Jim had kept his trap shut, because what was the point in reliving Sarge’s nine lives if he was dead?

(The first year Stark tried to take apart the Arctic, and Jim dragged the other Commandos back to the Alps, but neither team found anything under snow and ice. Jim hadn’t expected a miracle — but he’d maybe hoped for a deal, now that the SSR had flung open the doors to its lab and let the Devil in its bed.)


End file.
